Author: Matt Corallo 2011-09-08 15:20:42
Published on: 2011-09-08T15:20:42+00:00
In a Bitcoin StackExchange thread, concerns were raised about the potential for abuse of the alert protocol. David Perry forked bitcoin/bitcoin, removed the questionable code from main.cpp and submitted a pull request. Gavin Andresen noted that it merited discussion and consensus before acting on the pull request. He argued that the feature was still useful rather than dangerous. The question posed was whether the alert system is valuable, an unnecessary risk or just deprecated code.The alert system requires signature verification when receiving alerts, making it not a DoS target. While it may seem wrong to some that developers can send messages to everyone's computer, in financial software like Bitcoin, the alert system could prove very valuable. Urgent problems like the overflow bug require a way to notify people to upgrade immediately, which is what alerts provide. Since alerts no longer have the ability to put Bitcoin into RPC safe-mode, they are just a message, and there is no reason to remove them.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T22:17:47.953558+00:00